Many types of cork extractors have been previously proposed. Many cork extractors rely upon a lever which, after burying a corkscrew into a cork, requires upward force applied to a lever in order to extract the cork from a bottle. The position of the upwardly directed force relative to the bottle generally requires that an equal and opposite force be applied to the bottle in order to prevent the bottle from moving. Such designs result in wasted effort as countervailing forces must be applied by the user.
While some previous designs of corkscrews have used handles to apply the force necessary to extract a cork from a bottle, to the knowledge of the present inventor, such handles have been in the form of cranks wherein the portion gripped by the person using the device is offset in a single direction from the rotational axis of the crank. Additionally, some such devices utilize a driving mechanism which is at an angle to the vertical axis upon which the cork travels during extraction, thus, also requiring that countervailing forces being applied to the bottle during cork extraction.
Another aspect of some cork extractors is that a corkscrew is driven down through a block containing a helical passageway in order to impart a spiraling movement to the corkscrew. This facilitates insertion of the corkscrew into the cork. Such devices typically comprise a screw carrier. Typically, after insertion of the corkscrew into the cork, such screw carriers are attached to the block containing the helical passageway in order to prevent the corkscrew from simply spiraling back out of the cork during extraction of the cork from the bottle. Such devices which connect a screw carrier to the block containing the helical passageway, for example with releasable latches or friction, are unduly complicated structures and can be unreliable during operation. It would therefore be desirable to provide a cork extractor wherein the tendency of the corkscrew to rotate out of the cork is impeded by structure, which is independent of the screw carrier.
It would also be desirable to provide a cork extractor which minimizes or eliminates the need for forces which countervail the forces being applied to remove the cork from a bottle.